tsf@THEORY.CS.CMU.EDU (Timothy Freeman) (03/24/88)
In article <5430002@otter.hple.hp.com> cwp@otter.hple.hp.com (Chris Preist) writes: >I've heard mention of 'Objectivism' in several postings, but no explanation. >What is it? "Objectivism" usually refers to the "Objectivist" phliosophy presented (polemicized?) by Ayn Rand. >If it is the 'Objectivist' philosophy with respect to morality, >being, existance etc, then it is about the most non-individual thing in >existance ( To be mildly unfair to the objective philosophers, they basically >say there is only one truth wrt ethics/aesthetics/existance etc, and usually >claim to have access to it). Unfortunately, a lot of bandwidth in this newsgroup is consumed by people asserting that if a person chooses to do the same thing that other people do, then that person is not an individualist. If this were true, then being an individualist would be suicidal, since nearly everyone chooses to eat. I am an individualist if I carefully make my choices to get what I want (as opposed to letting someone else make them); I am still an individualist if those choices happen to be the same as someone else's. Whether I am an individualist depends on how I make my choices, not what choices I make (although there is some constraint; if I saw someone do something stupid immediately after lots of people around him did the same stupid thing, I would guess that he is not an individualist). So, if, as far as I can tell, Objectivism is correct, then I could believe it and still be an individualist. I don't know much about Objectivism, but it seems that they claim that the behaviors that they call "ethical" or "moral" maximize one's happiness in life. This is an interesting assertion which I would like to see some discussion of. I am not interested in reading gripes about how Objectivists usually present themselves, since I could easily choose to share their belief but avoid their presentation. One thing to be careful of about Ayn Rand's presentation of Objectivism is that she often defines new words that sound the same as ones already in use, but have a different meaning; "moral" is one such. So, do you have any specific gripes about the content of Objectivism, or were you just rejecting it because you didn't like the rhetoric of the Objectivist philosophers? (Of course you may have been doing something else entirely, but I want you to respond, so I'll leave it at that.) -- Tim Freeman Arpanet: tsf@theory.cs.cmu.edu Uucp: ...!seismo!theory.cs.cmu.edu!tsf
pan@well.UUCP (Philip Nicholls) (04/04/88)
Ayn Rand is to Philosophy what Emmanueal Velikoffski is to Astronomy.
--
"To ask a question, you must first know most of the answer."
- Robert Sheckley
pan@well.UUCP (you figure out how to get their).